Word: nostradamus
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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More than 400 years ago, the great Italian seer Nostradamus took a day out of his busy schedule to scratch on clay tablets his predictions for each year of the second half of the 20th century. Then he sent the predictions to 14 Plympton Street, which he had foreseen to be the future site of The Harvard Crimson. He's been right before, so here are his predictions for 1988, printed in their entirety...
...Tobias, 1516, is a tour de ! force of this kind. Though every crinkle of the figures' drapery looks natural, the planes of wood are whittled down to a fierce thinness, a buckling, bladelike sweep that from some angles seems to overwhelm the figure it surrounds and turn into a Nostradamus-like prophecy of 20th century constructed sculpture. These planes, screwing around the axes of arm and body, are given a momentum and self-sufficiency unique in the history of wood carving. Stoss's work, which can rarely be seen in quantity outside Nuremberg, is the revelation of this show...
...easily swayed by con men and shadowy ladies. Today every paperback emporium offers tiers of books claiming intimate acquaintance with the text of the future and the leaders of the past. Thanatologist Elisabeth Kiibler-Ross tells followers she speaks with the dead. A new edition of the prophecies of Nostradamus, "receded by computer" to give the requisite scientific gloss, has recently sold more than 100,000 copies in Europe. In every epoch of social confusion, concludes this entertaining history of folly, "the show goes on. The spirits are willing, and the flesh is weak.'' -By Stefan Kanfer
...surprise. He confesses an avid interest in spiritualism ("but not in seances") and has a huge library of books on the occult. He bought a summer house on an island off the Danish coast as a refuge for himself, his wife Barbara and their three children, just in case Nostradamus' prediction of a world war comes true. The bleak side of the Teutonic soul occasionally stares out uneasily from behind the affable visage. But it is quickly dispelled with the German equivalent of a verbal shrug: "Naja," says Prey, and gloomy Faust retreats. He seems constitutionally incapable of becoming...
...predictions of Nostradamus, whose significance is decidedly in the eye of the beholder, are to astrology as The Book of Revelation is to theology: they tend to be rediscovered during turbulent historical eras?such as now, when many Western Europeans are worried about faltering economies and superpower conflict. Among De Fontbrune's other interpretations of predictions: a new great war in 1999 (World War III?) after an earlier major conflict (World War II?), and the utilization of nuclear missiles ("After one great massing of soldiers, another greater one is prepared . . . one will see then fire in the sky coursing from...